Today’s piece from Foucault and his Interlocutors - highly recommended
Also recommended: Paul Veyne, Foucault: His Thought, His Character
Questions:
• What type of relationship does the present have to the bringing to light of crooked historical contours?
• p. 147 Does Veyne make Foucault’s arguments more objective/positivist than he should?
• What does Veyne mean in calling Foucault a positivist?
◦ What does it mean such that it isn’t an insult?
◦ Does it follow that Latour is a positivist?
• p. 165: Tease out differences between two definitions of ideologies, how they function for Veyne
• p.
181: Histories in terms of practices vs. peoples, centuries,
civilizations, governor/governed - revolution of Foucault is in turn to
practice. What distinguishes a practice as a unit of history in relation
to other units of history?
◦ Why say that practice is the only unit of analysis of history rather than one of many?
• Formalisms in Foucault, e.g. subjectivity - what is the status of those in relation to Veyne’s discussion of practices, etc.?
• pp.
179, 181 What is the motivation for attributing materialism to
Foucault? Is this ontological? Related to method? Metaphysics?
• p.
151 Welfare state - is there a better term for the arrangement of
things in which people desire what their rulers do? Is this
neoliberalism?
• p.
157 Preconceptual - reason why were are unconscious of submerged
grammar - why preconceptual rather than conceptual? Why aren’t there
concepts submerged in the iceberg?
◦ Why is it pre- rather than non-? Why is the submerge stuff not able to become conceptual?
◦ Foucault’s
use of grammar - does he use it in this way? (He uses it in AK - but
not to this extent.) Grammar doesn’t seem to relate to DP/HoS
• p. 147 What does Veyne mean by exceptionality? Usually comes up in claim about emptiness.
Discussion:
• Positivism
◦ Is contrast class rationalism or idealism? And positivism then empiricism (rather than logical positivism)?
◦ Some relationship between positivism and historicism. p. 181 Calls naturalized or taken for granted objects into question.
◦ In
sum, Veyne says it’s positivism all the way down, therefore look at
practices gives one a look at the really real. Is this in tension with
other commitments in article/for MF?
▪ This method is useful for finding what really happened. MF wouldn’t describe his work like this...
▪ …but
Veyne isn’t interested in what’s really happening, maybe - interested
in developing historical methodology separate from perspectivalism.
▪ …but
Veyne is centering this on his new feelings about his old work - he did
it wrong because he studied people, not practices. Was working with an
old historical method, having read MF I now realize it was a method, I
now have a better/the right method. Now sees more clearly. MFs method
set as better, ‘right’? p. 154
▪ Veyne's
MF: explaining practices not on the basis of other folks, societies,
etc. but other practices. Don’t have to transcend practices to explain
them.
▪ It
need not be that practices are the only way to the real - maybe he’s
making a local claim, that practices are positive (indexical? attached
to a date?)
▪ pp. 169-170 w/Duns Scotus footnote. Why bring him in and then talk about MF believing that matter exists in act?
◦ What’s
the purpose of discussing historical contours - is it to describe
things better or to disrupt the naturalness of the appearance?
◦ p. 170 quote from MF - 'Madness does not exist, but doesn’t mean it’s not real' -does this edge into metaphysics?
▪ Way
of thinking through the conditions of possibility - history as a site
of the Deleuzean virtual. This read undoes some of the other claims made
today.
▪ 'Claim
that madness doesn’t exist is positivist’ - practices are the best way
in terms of the order of operations to do history - start w practices so
as to avoid concepts that are bogged down in metaphysics. Won’t get as
good an explanation - will get one that’s more accurate, more real.
Again, does this align w MF? Is method of practices meant to get closer
and closer to the real, or destabilize the present?
▪ Passage from The Birth of Biopolitics, p. 4
▪ Verne’s
positivism is in these concrete practices - taking the concrete
practices and passing universals through those, rather than starting
with universals to organize practices.
▪ p. 176 Veyne cite of MF’s AK - positivities are the fields in which objects are the outputs
◦ If we’re going to say that some explanations are better than others, then what are the criteria?
▪ Veyne:
Need to uncover practices for the sake of uncovering practices (this is
the real) vs. MF uncovering practices to get to power relations. These
are different.
▪ Reading
Veyne through Latour: to explicate broader structures of power through
practices is to take the shortcut, not pay the price oneself/see the
practitioners paying the price.
▪ Question is in the purpose of history - to describe the real of the past or to get at power relations in the present
▪ Is
history directed temporally towards the present or the past? If
present, criteria aren’t related to accurately representing the real,
criteria is on what it does. If past, emphasis is on the accuracy of
descriptions against the real.
▪ Latour, from Whitehead - propositional, ideal that centers practices.
▪ Does
Veyne avoid reifying the method, or metaphysizing the method? p. 173 -
So keen to counter Marxism that he swings to the other pole and misses a
middle that Latour is more inclined to recognize.
▪ This
is the interest in preconceptual - it would be that middle. It’s
important that he says it’s nonconceptual. He seems to try and address
above problem through preconceptual.
▪ Does same work as implicit/explicit in Brandom.
◦ Feels like the practice is the agent in this - the practice objectivizes. Doesn’t feel like practice coalesces the doings.
▪ Maybe
makes more sense if with respect to range of possible actions -
critique of MF is that he evacuates agency from persons to structures.
MF does say there’s a range of actions we take that we’re not willful
about. One step down from big critique is to say that practices move us.
Empty space around our practices in which we can’t move.
▪ Practices
are conditions of possibility of what we can say. Still agency within
the practices, but all options are not available. Agency exist, but
bounded by practices.
▪ Point
of history for MF - make possible a reflexive critique of those
practices, which we can only do if we free ourselves from the notion
that these practices are natural. Freeing ourselves from the naturalness
of sex, e.g., makes possible a critique of the role of sexuality
